Harry's Place

MPAC’s forum now contains two explicit links to the Stormfront website to “prove” that Jews run the word’s media. Despite repeated complaints, neither the link contained in one thread, nor an entire thread posted supportive of the article from the neo-Nazi website have been taken down by MPAC forum’s moderators.

This can hardly be a surprise: MPAC are now running an article on their home page in praise of the Taliban in Pakistan. Earlier this month, the MPAC forum moderator, “Musab”, spent some considerable time singing the praises of the members of the vile and illegal “Al-Muhijaroon” group – knowing full well that this group is an illegal organisation in the UK due to its support and concrete links to terror.

The BNP’s main thrust is against migrant workers and immigration. Let’s not forget that.

It’s equally important to remember that Islamism is not just anti-Semitism under a thin ‘anti-Zionist veneer’. Amongst plenty of things there’s it moral agenda. I note that Tariq Ramandan, the favourite Muslim ‘progressive’ of Tories, Blair, Brown, Livingstone, respect, the SWP et.al. has been up to his old tricks in this area:

http://tendancecoatesy.wordpress.com/2009/05/01/tariq-ramadan-new-homophobic-and-sexist-charges/

Yes, absolutely

Coatesey – can we guest post that piece?

David T. honestly thinks that the BNP might win 4 or even 5 seats in the European Elections?

Really? As many as that? Not a mere one or two?

Does the BNP know this? Does Jacqui Jackboots know? Does the Harperson?

Pinker wins, Quirk loses; language is infinitely flexible and always changing. Pioneering ‘neverthelessing’ as a verb is super and something we can and should start doing. One neverthelessing coming right up:

“The British National Party contains some pretty odd fish and has some very ugly ideas. Nevertheless, a good showing for the BNP next month is in the real long-term e British People.”

Spot on.

And it’s not going to improve any time soon. The Obama administration is now seeking to amend certain laws that would allow American aid to go to a unity government in Palestine EVEN if Hamas is part of it.http://ajewwithaview.wordpress.com/2009/04/30/obama-sending-money-straight-into-hamas-hands-2/

Never mind that Hamas openly vows to ‘bathe the region in jewish blood’!

Islamic law states that once a bit of land has been part OF the House Of Islam, it must return to Islam – no matter what. Hence the claim on Israel by Hamas and Islamic Jihad. The war between Hamas and Israel is NOT just a localised problem – it is part of the ongoing problem between free nations and extremist Islam.

And condemnation of Israel is now virtually a national sport, in Britain. the airline BMI is currently red-faced and having to explain why it deleted Israel from the electronic map that appears on some of its planes – http://ajewwithaview.wordpress.com/2009/05/01/british-airline-deletes-israel-from-map-to-please-muslims/

Re Hizbut Tahrir:

Ten years ago, the British government was warned by several other countries that HT was a dangerous group, and one that is banned in many Arab nations. The advice fell on deaf ears – leaving HB at liberty to continue recruiting students, something it has always done rather effectively. ‘Londonistan’ by Melanie Phillips documents this brilliantly.

CORRECTION OF A REGRETTABLE ERROR IN FINGER-USE:

The British National Party contains some pretty odd fish and has some very ugly ideas. Nevertheless, a good showing for the BNP next month is in the real long-term interest of the British People.”

Yes, I’ve added some corrections; the links are in French btw.

So there are lots of anti-Semites out there. There always has been and there always will be. Some might be skin-head thugs, some university academics, some muslim clerics. We were here before them, and we’ll be here long after they’re gone. Long live Israel.

“We oppose anti-Muslim bigotry at Harry’s Place because we are anti-racists, social democrats and liberal pluralists. That is why we oppose Islamist politics. To embrace racism and bigotry to promote our opposition to Jamaat-e-Islami or Hamas/Muslim Brotherhood would be utterly self defeating.”

This is the key on the money paragraph. Absolutely right. We oppose Islamism not from a position of right wing xenophobia, but because we are progressives who believe in universal values. Which is an entirely different viewpoint to that which sometimes sadly festers in the commnet boxes.

Great piece.

Norm gets it exactly right and describes the current state of the debate. It’s ok these days to be an antisemite: it’s a perfectly reasonable view, nevertheless! – and we all know what Jews are like, after all, don’t we?

Just so long as the antisemitism is presented as being motivated by or helpful to the anti-colonialist and anti-zionist cause – anything goes!

If you want to celebrate German war crimes against Jews, if you want to deny that they happened, if you want to pray that they should happen again, fine!

If you want to fantasise about Jewish suffering:

“Before Israel dies, it must be humiliated and degraded. Allah willing, before they die, they will experience humiliation and degradation every day…. Allah willing, we will make them lose their eyesight, we will make them lose their brains.”

not a problem! Come and “meet” Khaled Marshal at the House of Lords.

Just remember to use the Livingstone formulation in your defence (”For far too long the accusation of antisemitism has been used against anyone who is critical of the policies of the Israeli government”), and get out of jail, free!

If you want to issue medieval blood libels against Jewish people, perhaps we at the Guardian can help distribute your filth to the world?

When this all got started with Arafat’s intifada and Durban, I thought that people would wake up and see where they were heading. Now I wonder whether, in Europe at least, we’re just trying to swim against the tide.

“The BNP is poised to win 4, 5 seats perhaps in the European Elections: and they’ve done so by conflating pop…”

Terrifying! Lets all vote Labour to stop this filth!

Hang on, the BNP have won a single parliamentary seat.

The BUF never won a single parliamentary at the height of Euro Nazism.

Overall, I would say its a good thing to send fascists to Strasburg. Better to keep them together in one place, within an institutionally undemocratic and authoritarian system.

Tabatha:

Islamic law states that once a bit of land has been part OF the House Of Islam, it must return to Islam – no matter what. Hence the claim on Israel by Hamas and Islamic Jihad.

This is incorrect. The claim made by Hamas is that the whole of Palestine is a “waqf” – a religious endowment. This is a specific legal claim. It is also an incorrect one and one which first came about with Hamas in 1988. It is incorrect because:

(a) Palestine was not and never has been a waqf, it was “fay’” – land which has been conquered rather than a privately initiated endowment of a completely privately owned property for charitable purposes. Whilst there are rules which govern how fay’ land should be for public good, it is a very different status which does not prevent trading it with anybody or passing ownership to anybody else in the way the status as waqf would.

For Hamas’s claim to be true there would have to have been no private property in Palestine whilst it was under Islamic rule. This is rubbish, and can be shown as such because there are legal records of private individuals endowing waqfs within Palestine at a time when Hamas claimed that all of it was a waqf. Clearly none of the scholars and jurists involved in those transactions believed that all of Palestine was a waqf otherwise they would not have bothered endowing small parts of it as waqf. There are also plenty of examples of other private transactions concerning title of land in Palestine – this would have been impossible if all of Palestine was a waqf.

(b) Nobody, before Hamas, had claimed Palestine to be a waqf (although other groups have now adopted that terminology.) It draws on a tradition going back to the Caliph Umar but ignores centuries of legal evidence which contradicts Hamas’s interpretation of Umar’s tradition. Whilst you can find earlier examples of people saying Palestinian-Muslim land shouldn’t become Israeli-Jewish land this was as a more purely moral, rather than strictly legal, motivation.

(c) Even if it were a waqf, which it isn’t, there are many examples of waqfs being sold and traded with non-Muslims (normally in exchange for provision of other land in replacement for the waqf or some kind of other benefit for the community).

It is only in the benefit of extremists to accept this faulty legal reasoning that there is an intractable legal issue in Palestine-Israel, that Muslims legally cannot accept Israel because Palestine is a waqf but moderates should not reinforce these narratives by parroting such ideologically motivated claims as though they are true.

So, should we do it? Should we enlist anti-Muslim bigotry in the struggle against Islamist politics?

Nevertheless, you will be accused of it every goddam day.

Gsirrah

Can I put the waqf/fay article up as a guest post?

David T. You’re welcome to.
Although, rereading it the last sentence is rather rambly. Maybe you could change “is a waqf but moderates should not reinforce these narratives by parroting such…” to “is a waqf. Moderates should not reinforce these narratives by parroting such…”
Thanks.

So, should we do it? Should we enlist anti-Muslim bigotry in the struggle against Islamist politics?

No of course we fucking shouldn’t. And what an utter disgrace it would be, if we did.

I concur with this comment and the response that said we are aginst Islamists and Islamism such that it threatens people. Its as worthy an “anti” as “anti-fascism”.

I agree that the struggle looks harder. Some time ago I took a blog to tackle these issues and I got tired of it. All I could do was reverse rant and call out Antisemites.

I once flirted with people with political clout but that clout did nothing.

My only successes were getting some 5Live posting Muslim antisemite radicals banned and content removed – but they are back. (yes, they confirmed that they were Muslims with the agenda they set out on)

I think there are other like me who want to do more – but are probably afraid of a knife in the back, or with kids.

I think what you/we need is a political champion who isn’t scared of a Muslim vote backlash threat. I though David Davies might be that person. I believe Michael Portillo could be. Anne Widdicombe, William Hague IDS all come to mind. No Labour or Libe Dem’s come to mind though.

On MPAC UK, you only have to go to their site to see how going down the hate and in-your-face route just attracts extremists who hate more than you could ever think.

David, if you had a fund to make some organisation to concentrate on these issues (and buy a few politicians in our “Zionist” tradition – only kidding) then I’d donate.

Another idea is to get someone stateside interested in the issue of creeping antisemitism and Islamism.

I think your dismissal of Wilders was to keep yourself clean of any anti-Muslim stain. However, you know from debate here that not exveryone thinks WIlders is as bad as some make out. I realise it seems a bit like an alliance with BNP – but its not.

What I note about BNP is that they arouse popular votes by dissing Muslims and immigrants but I haven’t seen Griffin with the balls to tackle mainstream Islamists. If he changed his focus then there would be some merit in allowing that blunt instrument to do its stuff. But, you can’t trust them.

Oh. I’m really stuck for a good answer!

Brilliant post, David.

(And I’ve just seen on CiF that I’m your “minion”. Well, happy to be minionising on this occasion. I’ll also gladly minion for Norm G on this one…just so long as you don’t mind, mein ubergruppenminionmeister.)

“Palestine was not and never has been a waqf, it was “fay’” – land which has been conquered rather than a privately initiated endowment of a completely privately owned property for charitable purposes. Whilst there are rules which govern how fay’ land should be for public good, it is a very different status which does not prevent trading it with anybody or passing ownership to anybody else in the way the status as waqf would.”

Agreed that Palestine was “conquered land” {Fay’} – but this does not, of itself. rule out the possibility of it being Waqf.

The author points out that there are examples of the sale of waqf – and even the sale of waqf to non-Muslims (just in case the buyers are ahl al-kitaab, actually). However, there are also numerous cases of waqf land being dedicated from land that was fay’ in status. The fay’ status land given as waqf by Salah ul-Din (Saladin) in Jerusalem and elsewhere is exactly a case in point. This land had been fay’ status for a few hundred years before that “most chivalrous lord” [the Kaiser's words, not mine] handed it over to the [Muslim] religious leaders of Jerusalem and elsewhere as waqf.

Under Shari’ah (or at least some interpretations of the same), Church land is also accorded waqf status – as was, at one time, land belonging to Jewish religious organisations or groups.

UPDATE:

MPAC UK have now removed the thread that used Stormfront to back-up its claims about Jewish control of the media. However, this was done because it was “off-topic”, not becuase quoting from Nazis is intrinsically wrong on MPAC UK fora.

The same poster is now continuing, unabated and unmoderated, to push Stormfront and other Nazi websites on another thread, to promote his belief in the Protocols and Jewish control of the media.

I thought you needed 12 people for a minion.

Elemental, have a read of “‘All of Palestine is Holy Muslim Waqf Land’: A Myth and its Roots’ by Yitzhak Reiter in Law, Custom, and Statute in the Muslim World, edited by Ron Shaham (Brill – Leiden – 2007)

However, the point is that whilst waqf land exists in Palestine, the whole of Palestine is not a waqf as Hamas claims. Many people repeat this claim uncritically and therefore I felt it needed refuting.

“I thought you needed 12 people for a minion.”

I thought 10.

Brilliant pieces by both David T and Norm; the two most articulate people writing on this subject in my opinion. Its still unbelievable to me, that with arguments like this, there is still so much misunderstanding and evil on the left.

Oh, it is 12 for a Jury and 13 for a Last Supper.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Minyan

“The traditional minyan for most cases consists of ten men, which continues to be the position within Orthodox Judaism.”

Whew, for a second I thought my wedding was invalid.

I can see that the far Right has had a certain degree of success by bashing Muslims. The BNP is poised to win 4, 5 seats perhaps in the European Elections: and they’ve done so by conflating popular xenophobia and anti-immigrant prejudice while claiming that British Muslims are conspirators in a plot to rape our women, steal our jobs, and take our homes.

Do you want to know something?

I think the actions, propaganda and campaigning of the BNP have actually had little or no effect on recuitment or support.

There are two things that drive people to support a Far Right party in Europe these days, and they are the following:

1) A corrupt, incompetant, irresponsable and unresponsive elite.

2) The habits, behaviors and actions of Muslims themselves.

The fact that all across Europe, Britian included, Muslims are way WAY over-represented in the prison population isn’t BNP propaganda.

It’s the reality.

The fact that Muslims are way, WAY over-represented in rape convictions isn’t BNP propaganda either.

It’s a fact.

Ditto for the numbers of them on the wselfare rolls.

Is it now bigotry merely to point out certains facts and realities that just happen to be unpleasant and ugly?

I think so.

You ascribe the negative qualities of the behaviors observed and actions witnessed to those who’ve observed those behaviors and who’ve witnessed those actions, and who’ve had the temerity and the courage to describe them.

A classic example of this dynamic concerns the recent misfortunes of France’s Sex Kitten

She’s been dragged…pouting…into court several times on “hate-speech” charges, but her pro-pos, the proofs and exhibits ostensibly demonstrating her guilt were more or less censored. But here in Canada we can access them, and what she said wasn’t a criticism of Muslims at all, but rather a scathing denunciation of France’s political class who’ve abandonned Republican Values and who’re jeopardising the official separation of Church and , something that’s has been in operation since 1905, simply to appease you-know-whom.

You tell your snivelling and cowardly politicans to grow a pair and you’re charged with hate-speech.

There’s another probleme with this appraoch outlined in this posting, and one which appears to be studiously ignored.

The impetus and desire to eradicate and marginalise the fundies must come from within the muslim community itself, and not from external actors with little or no connection to that community.

But alas! Another unpleasant observation emerges, and it is that that impetus shows NO signs whatsoever of emerging.

One can literally count the number of active Muslim reformers on the fingers of one hand.

Par contre, greasy, islamist slimeballs, various MB activists and caliphate fans like Tariq Ramadan are absolutely worshipped by countless young Muslims, who actively and enthusiastically embrace AND promote every backward, medieval idea these types comes up with.

That’s the real situation.

If you want to lead a parade of moderates, then you have to have a significant number of moderates marching behind you.

But you don’t

I think there are other like me who want to do more – but are probably afraid of a knife in the back, or with kids. parity ErRor @12:04

What can one say?

An Islamophobic statement or merely an intelligent and prudent observation?

Why has my comment been place in the waiting line?

Opposing uncontrolled, open-ended immigration is not “prejudice”: it’s rational behaviour.

David T, before I started rambling about awqaf and fay’ I was meaning to congratulate you on a fantastic post. Which it was, thank you.

Gsirrah

Thank you for the suggested reading. However, it remains a fact that Salah ul-Din granted as waqf land which was already betokened as fay’.

Consider: waqf is properly a gift of money, land or other property as a charitable act.

Literally waqf means to stop, contain, or to preserve. In shari’ah, a Waqf is a voluntary, permanent, irrevocable dedication of a portion of ones wealth – in cash or kind – to Allah. Once a waqf, it never gets gifted, inherited, or sold. It belongs to Allah and the corpus of the waqf always remains intact. The fruits of the waqf may be utilised for any shari’ah compliant purpose.

This hadith makes its status clear:

“Ibn ‘Umar reported: ‘Umar acquired land in Khaibar. He came to Allah’s Apostle (saw) and sought his advice in regard to it. He said: “Allah’s Messenger, I have acquired land in Khaibar. I have never acquired more valuable for me than this, so what do you command I do with it? Thereupon the Prophet (saw) said: If you like, you may keep the corpus intact and give its produce as Sadaqah. So ‘Umar gave it as Sadaqah declaring that the property must not be sold or inherited or given away as a gift. And ‘Umar devoted it to the poor, to the nearest of kin, to the emancipation of slaves, to wayfarers/guests, and in the way of Allah.” – Sahih Muslim

There is no mention in the fiqh of waqf of any of the four Sunni and one (main) Shi’ah religious legal schools of the impermissibility of fay’ land being granted as waqf by the owners of the same.

As I have pointed out, there are historical examples of fay’ being granted as waqf.

Your main point – that the Hamas doctrine of the whole of Palestine being waqf is unsustainable and in error – is perfectly correct, however.

Venezuela today, Britain tomorrow?

“In 1998, the year Hugo Chavez was elected president, there were 22,000 Jews in Venezuela. Today the Jewish population is estimated at between 10,000 and 15,000.

Those numbers tell a story, and it’s not a happy one. The Jews of Venezuela are fleeing to Miami, Madrid and elsewhere because of the anti-Semitism they face at home. In an interview this week in Washington, D.C., the country’s chief rabbi sounds a warning bell: “There’s anxiety in the Jewish community because of what has happened,” says Rabbi Pynchas Bremer, “and of course because of what may happen.” ”

http://tinyurl.com/dkur76

One might like to point out, with reference to the hadith above quoted, that ‘Umar came by his land in Khaibar as a result of the expulsion of the Jewish community of that place. In other words, the land was fay’ in the Shari’ah.

In other words, ‘Umah granted fay’ land as waqf.

[He later completed the expulsion of all Jews from the Hijaz.]

“Oh, it is 12 for a Jury and 13 for a Last Supper.”

Ah no – 12 jurors and one judge – surely.

Good post, David, though it might help if you were a bit clearer about what you mean by “anti-Muslim bigotry”, which sounds like Islamophobia to me. Bigotry means narrow-minded prejudice, i.e. judging by gut reaction instead of facts. The trouble is that the facts alone are pretty damning. I listened to Wilders’ speech, for example and could see little that could be challenged in it. Does that make Wilders a bigot?

… British Muslims are conspirators in a plot to rape our women, steal our jobs, and take our homes

There is not much as pernicious as a half truth. Such a narrative would not work (except against Jews) if there were not more than a grain of truth in it. Think “fresh meat” as a description of white girls, for example. Have you ever thought how ghettoes happen? Muslims club together, sometimes with financial help from abroad, to buy up property in areas they wish to take over. The “steal our jobs” jibe does not have much behind it, but conflate it with the others and those with a grievance will buy it.

The BNP is gaining because there has been no debate on such issues. Worse, the MSM, politicians, and the BBC in particular, push the story that much of our current knowledge and culture was developed by Muslims, that Islam is a “religion of peace”. Eid is celebrated, Christmas is denigrated. Intellectuals who take the time to look at this narrative find it full of myths and lies. Others may not know what it is that they don’t like about Muslims, and know that they should not speak against them for fear of being branded racist, but their bones know that someone is cheating them.

In some forums, such as some public debates and on the internet, there is full blooded criticism of Islam, but little of that reaches the average factory, farm or office worker. Why? I submit mostly on account of the BBC. We get daft programmes like “Don’t panic, I’m Islamic”, trying to belittle genuine fears without addressing them. And then when a Muslim issue comes up on Newsnight or Panorama, they drag out nutters like Anjem Chowdry or smarmy dissemblers like Bungle. Are the BBC so stupid that they do not realise that both approaches are undermining the story they are trying to present (presumably that Muslims are just like us), one by condescension and the other by dramatisation for the sake of “good television”?

If the BBC (and others) want to cut through this mishmash of politically correct dishonesty, they should get heavyweights like Ibn Warraq, Geert Wilders and Daniel Pipes to debate with Tamimi, Bungle and Ramadan. They won’t, of course, because they know that the Muslims would get shredded, and that as a result there may be riots on the street and shouts of “Islamophobia” in the Mosques and the Guardian. But while they cringe from honest debate, people are voting with their feet – for the BNP. Not me, by the way – the BNP are drawing mostly from Labour voters, curious for a “far right” party, if the political spectrum is the simple linear continuum that “far right” implies.

This week’s prize for the vilest abuse of the term anti-Semitism, as well as display of anti-Palestinian sentiment, must go to Hagai Segal for an unparalleled piece of open, mainstream racism (Ynetnews), titled ‘Why should they get a state?’ A few gems:

Modern Palestinian demand for state stems from anti-Semitic desire to harass Jews

Yeshayahu Leibowitz once ruled that even a kitchen table is allowed to present itself as a people, and the Palestinians jumped on the bandwagon of this simplistic criterion.

Anti-Semitic trick

But in fact, it’s not so odd. The demand for the establishment of a Palestinian state, speaking of the recent Durban II conference, is another type of anti-Semitic trick against us.

The Palestinians claim to have lived here for many generations, yet they remembered to present their desire for self-determination only when we returned here from the Diaspora. They didn’t speak about two states for two peoples when the Jordanians ruled Judea and Samaria and when the Egyptians took over Gaza. They also said nothing when Damascus referred to Palestine as southern Syria.

Their modern demand for independence stems from a desire to harass us. Should Obama suddenly proposes not to have any state here – neither ours nor theirs – they may be sympathetic to the idea. Try it and you’ll see.

Well, this is one of the clearest cases of abuse of the term anti-Semitism I’ve come across in weeks (well, apart from on Harry’s Place, of course). ‘Nevertheless’, how should I criticise it without being anti-Semitic???

An anti-Zionist with a dilemma.

As I have pointed out, there are historical examples of fay’ being granted as waqf.

And if you read what I originally wrote you will see that I have never disagreed with that statement. (”Clearly none of the scholars and jurists involved in those transactions believed that all of Palestine was a waqf otherwise they would not have bothered endowing small parts of it as waqf.”)

This weeks prize for the most irrelevant straw man goes to Gert.

Some criticism of Israel is anti-semitic

Some criticism of Israel is not

Sometimes allegations of anti-semitism on the part of such critics are accurate

Sometimes allegations of anti-semitism on the part of such critics are inaccurate.

Sometimes, mayble, the inaccurate allegations are malicious or dishonest.

@Left Liberal Hawk

Where’s the straw man? And where’s your denunciation of this racist hypocrite? Where’s the denunciation full stop?

Gert, the topic of this thread is the tolerance and acceptance of anti-semitism, when wrapped up in what is perceived as “legitimate” anti Zionism / criticism of Israel, amongst parts of the left. This is a disgrace when opposition to such racism ought to be axiomatic.

A related issue is that when we, on the Decent left (for want of a better word) point this out we are routinely met with the Livingstone formulation argument – ie that we are trying to stifle, prevent or delegitimise any criticsm of Israel by falsely and dishonestly crying “anti-semitism”. This is plainly inaccurate and suggests that we have no real concern about anti-semitism and are only raising the argument to defend Israel. It is a dishonest argument and one which is designed to dodge the issue.

Rather than engage with these points you have chosen to reproduce some quotes from a commentator who has raised an argument that criticism of Israel, or attacks on Israel, are anti-semitic. In this case the argument is a poor one and, arguably expressed chauvanistic terms, but that does not invalidate – or even relate to – the points being made in the post.

To repeat, sometimes defenders of Israel wrongly accuse Israel’s critics of anti semitism. If they do so maliciously or in a way which is itself prejudiced against arabs or Palestinians, then it should be condemned. The denunciation you ask for is here:-

“We’ve challenged the tropes of anti-Muslim bigotry: in posts and in comments. We’ve argued against the “taqqyiah” slur. We’ve challenged the essentialist view of Islam that is peddled by Islamists and anti-Muslim bigots alike. We’ve supported liberal and democratic political movements in countries with majority Muslim populations. “

@Left Liberal Hawk

In this case the argument is a poor one and, arguably expressed chauvanistic terms, [...]

So you have a Zionist nutter who claims the demand for Palestinian statehood is essentially ‘anti-Semitic’ harassment and that’s all you’ve gotta say: ‘poor and chauvinistic argument’??? You call yourself anti-racist?

The total misuse of the term anti-Semitism (which is precisely why I brought it up) stares you in the face. Well, clearly not yours.

I rest my case for now…

The ‘Decent Left’, yeah, you might want to look for a more accurate term: how about ‘the pro-Zionist centre Right’? (should probably be spelled ‘center’, my bad…)

Apologies, Gsirrah – you are absolutely correct. My mistake.

All I can find as excuse is that I sat on my reading glasses last night after imbibing rather a large amount of falling-down juice.

Rest your case all you want – you are still failing to enage with or address the point of this post.

I am an anti-racist. The argument made by the “nutter” is poor and chauvinistic and it does, in my opinion constitute a misuse of the term anti-semitism. I am not convinced that it is racist but even if it is that does not invalidate or respond to the point made in the post.

The argument that there was no Palestinian people or nation, and certainly no Palestinian nationalism, prior to a large scale Jewish presence in Palestine is one with long history and with some merit. The argument that many arab nationalists who opposed (or were at best neutral to) the concept of a Palestinian state – certainly prior to 48 – suddenly adopted it because of opposition to Israel is a reasonable one. Syria wanted to incorproate Palestine into a greater Syria. Jordan and Egypt wanted to annex Palestine and made no efforts to create an embryonic Palestian state between 48 and 67.

I dont think either argument is intrinsically or neccessarily racist or even chauvinistic – although I , along with the likes of Norm G and David T, do not accept them as invalidating the Palestinians legitimate claim to statehood in Gaza and the West Bank.

If you think that the likes of Norman G, a Marxian democratic socialist, is on the centre Right then you need to work on more than just your spelling.

Great piece David T.
Just to inject a little optimism into an otherwise quite depressing landscape, how about the words of Jean Jaques Rousseau from his work ‘The Social Contract’ of 1762.
“Through it alone (the Talmud) that extraordinary nation so often subjugated, so often dispersed and outwardly destroyed, but always idolatrous of its Law, has preserved itself unto our days…Its mores and rituals persist and will persist to the end of the world…..”

@Liberal Hawk:

If you think that the likes of Norman G, a Marxian democratic socialist, [...]

You sure he’s not a crypto-Stalinist (lol – these labels!)? And what’s he gotta do with anything? Oh, yeah, another fighter against the ‘political anti-Semitism’…

And a good dollop of Jewish Supremacist thinking from Israelinurse: the Talmud as template for the Good Society, ethnic cleansing and all. Light unto the nations. Or in the case of Israel: ‘Blight unto the nations’.

LLH, best ignore Gert.

Gert’s a far Right wannabe and very obsessive on these topics, as he tries to derail the thread.

Thanks for the laugh Gert. You have no idea how much it amuses me that my very existance seems to send you into apoplexy.

Alcuin, your disgusting stereotype of young Muslim men lusting after white women is akin to the portrayal in Der Sturmer of Jewish men lusting after Aryan German maidens.

“The Palestinians claim to have lived here for many generations, yet they remembered to present their desire for self-determination only when we returned here from the Diaspora. They didn’t speak about two states for two peoples when the Jordanians ruled Judea and Samaria and when the Egyptians took over Gaza. They also said nothing when Damascus referred to Palestine as southern Syria”

Quite true.

Gene,

Complete, and probably deliberate, misrepresentation of my position, probably due to an inane, visceral and stereotypical view of “the right” typical of Trots. Perhaps the obvious point that the BNP is closer to the left than the right got you where it hurts, eh?

The Palestinians claim to have lived here for many generations, yet they remembered to present their desire for self-determination only when we returned here from the Diaspora. They didn’t speak about two states for two peoples when the Jordanians ruled Judea and Samaria and when the Egyptians took over Gaza. They also said nothing when Damascus referred to Palestine as southern Syria.

The Palestinians’ statelesness under those other foreign rules didn’t translate into a significant disruption of their lives. When Jewish settlers began pouring in, however, they understood that in the long run a society would be shaped which would introduce substantial changes to their way of life — changes they did not want. They rallied together to stop an immigration they were never consulted about.

The same holds true for post-1967 settlement of the West Bank and Gaza. Neither Egypt nor Jordan had checkpoints, barbed wire, walls, segregated roads, outposts. Nor did they stone Palestinian schoolgirls as they walked to school, or burn their olive trees.

People tend to react when their lifestyle is threatened.

And there were also no checkpoints, barbed wire, walls or segregated roads from 1967 until the first intefada in December 1987.
Then Israelis started getting firebombed and murdered whilst driving along the road, so security measures had to be put in place.
Unless of course, Buster, you think that burning people alive in cars is a normal thing to do.

“People tend to react when their lifestyle is threatened.”

Agreed. One way they react is by developing a sense of national identity. Palestinians being a case in point.

“Unless of course, Buster, you think that burning people alive in cars is a normal thing to do”

For him, substitute “desirable when Jewish” for “normal”.

We oppose anti-Muslim bigotry at Harry’s Place because we are anti-racists, social democrats and liberal pluralists. That is why we oppose Islamist politics. — David T

Do you oppose racist policy that discriminates against white Christian males, though?

Becasue if you dont, all your yammering about universal values doesnt mean squat. You just support Muslims as well as Jews over these groups.

Shame on you.

Do you oppose racist policy that discriminates against white Christian males, though? — EscapeVelocity (nwo)

Does that include gay white Christian males, though?

Becasue [sic] if you dont [sic], all your yammering and so forth

Im tolerant of gays.

However, I dont see the need to promote homosexual sex via the auspices of government or government agency. Or put up signs promoting gay sex in the bushes at the public park.

There is a great line by Claire Berlinski in a review of Delsol’s Icarus Fallen on the Hoover institute website.

Quote -

European man has in recent memory suffered two great losses, first his Christian faith and then its replacement — a vision of human perfectibility absent supernatural guidance. Failed experiments in utopianism, particularly in its communist and fascist expressions, have left him, like Icarus, singed at the wing-tips and fallen, paralyzed by self-doubt.

Utopian ideologies were, as she says, “systems of reference structured like cathedrals,” and her use of this rich simile is no accident. Europe has spent the past several centuries, not just this one, in a series of struggles to find a replacement for its lost Christian faith. Until recently, for example, nationalism was a substitute for religious belief; in France, the idea of France itself and its civilizing mission lent meaning to the lives of Frenchmen, just as the mystical Aryan ideal stood in for religious belief in Germany. The nation-state, the arts, music, science, fascism, communism, even rationality itself — all of these were substitutes for Christianity, and all failed. “We have watched all the cathedrals fall into ruin,” Delsol laments, “one after another.” But where McGrath sees in this the inevitability of religious revival, Delsol discerns no such thing. She finds her contemporaries’ fear of ideological certainty fully reasonable: Rigid orthodoxy, after all, did give rise to both the Inquisition and the Holocaust. So a return to the past is impossible, and no one has the faintest idea what the future might hold.

Man continues, nonetheless, to long for utopia and for the absolute — this is a design feature, to paraphrase Delsol, not a bug — and for a means to interpret his existence. But he no longer possesses a coherent ideological vehicle by which to express this longing. Here she sees the source of the profound risk-aversion of the modern European: “In general,” she writes, “our contemporary cannot imagine for what cause he would sacrifice his life because he does not know what his life means.” Though Delsol does not explicitly say as much, this is as good an explanation as we are apt to find for Europe’s recent approach to international affairs: How better, for example, to explain the willingness of the Spanish people instantly and obediently to capitulate to the demands of the terrorists who last year slaughtered some 200 of their countrymen?

Lacking any sense of purpose, Delsol asserts, modern man enshrouds himself in technological and physical comfort, leading a life that is at once free of risk and mediocre, mouthing vapid, unexamined clichés. These she calls “the clandestine ideology of our time” — clandestine because no overt adherence to ideology is now socially permissible. Yet the banishment of the economy of ideology, she astutely remarks, has encouraged a black market to flourish in its place: “This underground moral code is saturated with sentimentality yet arbitrarily intolerant.” The code is a close cousin to the political correctness of the Americans, and it is the unspoken foundation of the modern European welfare state — a society predicated on an ever-expanding sense of entitlement:
Anything contemporary man needs or envies, anything that seems desirable to him without reflection, becomes the object of a demanded right. Human rights are invoked as a reason for refusing to show identification, for becoming indignant against the deportation of delinquent foreigners, for forcing the state to take illegal aliens under its wing, for justifying squatting by homeless people, for questioning the active hunt for terrorists. It is not only desire or whim that leads to rights claims, but instinctive sentimentality and superficial indignation as well.

Another principle of this code is the estimation of tolerance above all other virtues. Once defined by the absence of state prohibitions against certain ideas and behaviors, tolerance has come to be conflated with legitimization — as the state itself now actively encourages those ideas and behaviors through legal and material aid. Delsol finds this pernicious, and rightly so. One need only look at the Netherlands to see exactly where this orthodoxy leads: When an artist created a street mural with the words “Thou shalt not kill” in response to the murder — by a Muslim radical — of filmmaker Theo Van Gogh, Dutch police immediately destroyed it in the name of tolerance. Deputy Prime minister Gerrit Zalm was widely criticized for declaring the Netherlands to be at war with Islamic extremism. “We fall,” said Green-left leader Femke Halsema, “too easily into an ‘us and them’ antithesis with the word war.” No more perfect example of Delsol’s thesis can be imagined. “Dominated by emotion,” she observes,

our era overflows with treacly sentiment. It is almost as if the feelings that were once associated with a certain type of piety have contaminated the whole population. . . . Seeking the good while remaining indifferent to the truth gives rise to a morality of sentimentality.

My only quibble: This is not just a morality of sentimentality; it is a morality of eager, collective suicide.

Delsol’s is certainly not the first baleful assessment of our ambient culture of moral relativism — perhaps quasi-relativism is more apt because, as she rightly notes, its practitioners unquestionably accept moral absolutes (“one must be tolerant”) while insisting that they indignantly reject them. But her criticism is particularly lucid, and her analysis of the reasons for the rise of this ideology — and the kind of culture to which it in turn gives rise — unusually canny.

Aister mcgrath contends that a new “cultural sensitivity” has “led to religious beliefs being treated with new respect.” Yet on the pages of our major news organs we find the faithful described in the most disrespectful terms. Here is novelist Jane Smiley, in Slate, depicting them as “unteachably ignorant,” advising us to “[l]isten to what the red state citizens say about themselves, the songs they write, and the sermons they flock to. They know who they are — they are full of original sin and they have a taste for violence.” Brian Reade of the Mirror calls the faithful “self-righteous, gun-totin’, military-lovin’, sister-marryin’, abortion-hatin’, gay-loathin’, foreigner-despisin’, non-passport ownin’ red-necks.” Maureen Dowd, predictable as sunrise, sees “a vengeful mob — revved up by rectitude — running around with torches and hatchets after heathens and pagans and infidels.” And Nicolas Kristof echoes his New York Times colleague with his nod to “wheat-hugging, gun-shooting, Spanish-speaking, beer-guzzling, Bible-toting” Americans. If Delsol’s thesis needs further confirmation, consider this: These critics are exercised about the intolerance of the religious.

No, not much newfound respect for religion on display here — just a good deal of what Delsol calls the “ideology of the apostate.” Mainstream moral thinking remains, above all, structured around the rejection of religious morality. “The drama of the present age,” she observes, “does not lie so much in the return of certain figures of existence as it does in the fact that these figures were — and in many cases still are — despised.” Evidence for Delsol’s somber assessment of Western man, with his limited, repulsive view of truth and transcendence, is everywhere, belying McGrath’s sunny appraisal of man’s renewed spiritual sensitivity.

http://www.hoover.org/publications/policyreview/3431831.html

End Quote

Nobody, before Hamas, had claimed Palestine to be a waqf (although other groups have now adopted that terminology.) It draws on a tradition going back to the Caliph Umar but ignores centuries of legal evidence which contradicts Hamas’s interpretation of Umar’s tradition.

Where is this tradition of Umar recorded? Because Hamas may be guilty of more than mere misinterpretation. Did the tradition, in its transmitted form, actually use the word “waqf”? Consider Hamas’ own preamble to the argument, from their charter:

This is the status [of the land] in Islamic Shari’a, and it is similar to all lands conquered by Islam by force, and made thereby Waqf lands upon their conquest, for all generations of Muslims until the Day of Resurrection.

Conquest ipso facto makes fay’, not waqf. So where did they get this?

Should we enlist anti-Muslim bigotry in the struggle against Islamist politics?

You tolerate plenty of people who do.

David T: you’re spot on again, excellent post, please keep up the good work!

HB:”The Palestinians’ statelesness under those other foreign rules didn’t translate into a significant disruption of their lives. Neither Egypt nor Jordan had checkpoints, barbed wire, walls,..”

Black September? no disruption, just a minor ripple hmm? Thousands dead and thousands driven out by Jordan- it seems you buy the euphemism “era of regrettable events”, as it is described in some quarters.

My dander is up… and it’s given me some inspiration: How about, instead of getting offended every time one of those dingbat hate sites says “Jews control [insert favorite thing here]” — let’s make it a self-fulfilling prophecy, and actually TAKE CONTROL of whatever! The world wouldn’t be in NEARLY the mess it’s in if Jews really did run it! We already get the blame, we might as well get the benefits too.

Getting offended is what the enemy wants us to do, because it is non-productive and gives them a good laugh at our expense. Stop letting them push our buttons! We’ve got the brains to do this, let’s go for it!